This is Star Wars fanfiction, and I mean that in the best possible sense: the copyrighted details have been changed, but the same heart beats here. ( )

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Title: The Price of the Stars
Series: Mageworlds #1
Authors: Debra Doyle & James Macdonald
Rating: 4 of 5 Stars
Genre: SFF
Pages: 406
Words: 143.5K

Synopsis:

From Fritzfreiheit.com/wiki/Mageworlds_(series)

Freebooter at heart, spacer by trade, Beka Rosselin-Metadi doesn't want to hear about how her father whose rugged general ship held back the Mageworlds -- or her highborn mother whose leadership has held the galaxy together since. Beka pilots spacecraft -- as far from her famous family as possible.

Then Beka's mother is assassinated on the Senate floor, and her father offers her the title to Warhammer, prize ship from his own freebooting youth -- if she agrees to deliver the assassins to him "off the books."

Looking for assassins has a tendency to make assassins look for you. In doing so, Beka's arranged her own very public death and adopted a new identity; now all she has to do is leave a trail of kidnappings and corpses across five star systems, and blow the roof off the strongest private fortress in the galaxy.

My Thoughts:

This book, the first of seven, was published in 1992. Timothy Zahn had published his seminal Heir to the Empire in 1991 which ignited the much beloved and much maligned Star Wars Extended Universe. This obviously was trying to catch some of that popularity. While it may not have taken off like the EU, where it was FAR more successful was in how it passed the torch to the next generation.

What killed the the EU (besides Lucas simply killing it off because he's a jackass, just like Disney, but Disney is a jackass whore) was the fact that none of the writers used ever created any characters who could hold a torch to the Big 3 (Luke, Leia and Han). Even one of the final books, Crucible, was ALL about those 3 characters while ignoring sub-characters who were supposed to be the next generation of heroes.

Doyle & Macdonald don't make the mistake of passing the torch. That's already done. And what's more, one of the big 3 is killed right at the beginning, thus propelling the whole adventure. It was handled masterfully. When I started the Galaxy's Edge series I was overpowered by the Star Wars vibe. It was Stormtroopers as the goodguys and it was fantastic. This series had the Star Wars vibe, but it was much more of the rogue'ish trader and mystic than the military. It was a different aspect but it was just as fun.

My only complaint was that the timeline didn't feel like it was told as. I believe this book was supposed to have taken about 2 years but honestly, it felt like 2 months. That's a nitpicky thing, I know.

★★★★☆ ( )

DNF.

http://bactra.org/weblog/algae-2015-03.html ( )

The Price of the Stars is a space opera, complete with a roguish spaceship captain (comes standard with one specially-outfitted ship), a wise old mentor-type (may say cryptic things and speak in overly formal tones), and a few people with prices on their heads (some of them family). And a mystical energy that Adepts and Mages can control. Remind you of anything?

Yes, it's all a bit Star Wars-esque. Still, Beka Rosselin-Metadi (the aforementioned captain) is no orphaned farmboy from the back of beyond, and her skills in flying and fighting are tested to breaking as she works to discover who assassinated her mother. On the up side, there are at least two great female main characters. On the down side, it rather seems like the rest of galaxy is male. Ah, well.

It takes some time for the story to get going, but once it does, it just doesn't stop. The second half of the book is a steady stream of ground skirmishes, space battles, spy missions, training exercises - and the occasional war room where they plan skirmishes, battles, and missions. It definitely took awhile for me to get into it, but then I couldn't put it down. ( )